Hans van der Maarel

Posted 12 June 2012 - 01:03 PM

Hans van der Maarel

CartoTalk Editor-in-Chief

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Netherlands

(Old) topographic maps can be found here: http://mapstor.com/. I've used these myself in the past and they come with a world file (OZI Explorer), which Global Mapper can read. At least that's how they did it a few years ago. You can either download them one by one for free but through an annoying captcha, or pay a few $ and just download the whole set in one go.

East View Cartographic (soon to become East View Geospatial apparently) has a lot of Russian data/maps for sale as well. No personal experience with them, but they do have a good reputation.

NicKV

Posted 16 June 2012 - 04:05 AM

It has extensive coverage of former USSR at 1:500 000, 1:200 000, less so at 1:100 000 and some at 1:50 000. The site has quite an easy GUI for selecting maps.

You should know that not all the USSR was ever mapped at 1:50 000 or 1:100 000, but there are thousands of maps to cover its territory.

VTU the USSR military mapping organisation also produced large scale plans of towns and cities of the USSR and worldwide. These are usually at 1:10 000 or 1:25 000. They are more difficult to obtain.

Maps from Mapstor are visibly watermarked, have been scanned at quite a low resolution ?250dpi and were done 256 colour (but given as 24-bit .jpgs).

If you enter the following search terms (Russian words in cyrillic) into Google, or better, a Russian search engine, it will return a list of websites displaying topo maps, many of which are often of former USSR.

"Топографическая карта" + "1:50000" (or + "1:100000" etc)

It goes without saying, that if you are downloading from a Russian website, make sure you have installed very good anti-virus/security software!

I can also provide you with maps I have, if you let me know you email address and the grid quadrangle you need need maps for. The jpg files are quite small so can be emailed.